Fires of Liberation: An Oral History of the War
by Chris Ganale
Summary: We have survived against all odds. Humanity defeated the machines. As the dust settles over the global battlefields, a survivor sets out to record the stories of the triumphs and tragedies of the rise of the machines.
1. Author Foreword

**A/N:** As I was describing this project to one of my fellow actors from Project: Arashi, he comically, and correctly, pointed out that it was shaping up very similar to World War Z. So I decided to take that idea and run with it. _Fires of Liberation: An Oral History of the Human-Machine War_ is a story composed of stories, each chapter told from the perspective of a different character (looking at approximately 7-10 characters telling their stories as of now, more may come later), with the overall work being compiled and recorded by Kazumi Asakura, who will serve as narrator. In order to authentically portray a change in tone and format from one character to the next, I am not the only author working on this project. I'll usually leave an annotation for who writes for what character on their first appearance.

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**Foreword**

It goes by many names. Armageddon, Judgment, the End of Days, the Dark Times. Then there are the more secular names that it answers to: the Human-Machine War, the War Against the Machines, the Great War, the Unification. Whatever you choose to call it, it's over. It's done. Against all odds in a titanic struggle, the enduring survival of the human species has been assured with Skynet's defeat. As a species, we will live on.

It's been two years now since V-S Day. With the ashes of the war still hanging in the sky and the scars of the battles still fresh on our hearts, the United Nations Security Council determined that the time to honor our heroes and our fallen was now, with the commemoration of the Museum of Humanity in San Francisco, California, and the commissioning of the 'Asakura Report on the State of Human Affairs Up To, During, and Following the Human-Machine War.' As compiled by me, Asakura Kazumi, via a series of interviews with those who have survived the war. When my report was initially submitted, the Security Council rejected it on the grounds of having too much of 'the human element' muddling the cold, hard facts.

But it was that human element, I had argued, that separated us from the machines we had nearly been slaughtered by. It was that human element that gave us the edge in engagement after engagement. It was the human edge that led two hundred human survivors to bring down the ruins of Los Angeles upon themselves and a Skynet force thousands strong in a modern-day retelling of the Spartans at Thermopylae. It was the human edge that compelled the non-unified resistance forces in Japan to abandon an unwinnable battle in favor of surviving to fight another day. It was the human edge that later brought back those forces, their ranks swelled by other groups and riding a tsunami of momentum, to reconquer Japan and declare it a safe zone for humanity from which the entire war was directed. The council chair found my outrage a bit humorous, and his response was a mere "Then write a book about it. This information is by no means classified."

So that's exactly what I've done. This work you are reading cannot be claimed as my own by any stretch of the imagination, save for it being my hand that put these words to paper. From the fires of Judgment Day was forged the army of humanity, which responded to Skynet in kind with its own flames that led us to survival. This is the story of these bold survivors, and at the same time it is also your story, the enduring story of mankind, through the fires of liberation and into the future that is now back in our hands. It is this author's hope that as you read this book, read these stories, that a clear picture will start to form out of the fog of history. Showing how we were outnumbered, outgunned, and outmatched. During this war, our species was pushed to the crumbling brink of extinction. As we teetered on that precipice, staring down into the abyss, a hand reached out, pulled us back from the brink, and gave us hope. A hand of a hero.

**Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!  
****We laughed, knowing that better men would come,  
****And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags,  
****He wars on Death, for lives: not men, for flags.  
**- The Next War

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**A/N:** My buddy Tikigod, it's hard to answer your reviews when you've got PMs disabled and I don't have a contact address for you, dude.


	2. Prologue: Regret

**Prologue  
****Regret**

My name is Chao Lingshen, and this is not the future I remembered. I am a mage, a descendant of the great magister magi Negi Springfield, and his father the Thousand Master before him. Like many in my lineage, there exists within me a great wellspring of magical power. But in my time, magic is not the power that it used to be-yo. Technology is the revered almighty power of the time I'm used to, and though it's true that with our technology we achieved superluminal travel and the ability to turn a human being into a green-armored juggernaut, all our technology has failed us in the genocidal campaign being inflicted upon us by a great alien conglomeration.

Combining my vast magical heritage and my knowledge of all the technology of the day, I constructed a series of devices, all bearing the name Casseiopeia. Quite possibly my greatest achievement-ne. The ultimate blend of magic and technology; no, truly, this device is the ultimate weapon. With this device, I reasoned, I could go back in time. I could change history.

Of course, it was never really that simple. As I said before, technology was humanity's god in my time period, and it was a very jealous god. ONI, the Office of Naval Intelligence (and don't you think for a second that that acronym being the Japanese word for _demon_ is a coincidence-ne!), their spooks caught me after my first time-travel attempt. Magic was an unknown, a threat; they lumped me in the same category as the Insurrectionists! I was nothing but loyal to the UNSC-ne! I was doing this for the sake of Earth, my home world of Mars, and all of humanity all across the galaxy! And they _dared_ to compare me with those traitors!

They very nearly created an enemy of me and all my ancestry right then and there-yo. But I remembered the words passed down from my great ancestor, words that I'd kept in my heart from the day I'd been told them: That evil done for the sake of greater good is a burden that all must accept. Those words reminded me that ONI only saw magic as a distraction in the face of the very real threat of the Covenant. I feel sorry for them, sometimes, when I think about it. To not know that the true salvation laid not in the god of technology, but with the human spirit that magic was inextricably a part of.

That just meant that I would have to bear the burden myself. I would have to perform a great and terrible deed, the most terrible of all being to inflict shame and dishonor upon my great ancestor, in order to pave the way for the survival of our species in my time period.

ONI didn't like that talk at all. I suppose it was foolish of me, a naïve child of only seven years, to openly tell them of these plans. Looking back, I'm not surprised they regarded me as an Insurrectionist. They took what they believed to be appropriate measures. ONI was not blind to the existence of magic, you see. They even employed mages of their own to do their dirty work that required said magic; such hypocrites-ne. Such dirty work involved inscribing a network of spell sigils into my body to greatly limit my magical power, and cause tremendous pain when I did try to cast spells. After a few hospital visits and one near-death experience, I 'calmed down' enough for ONI to give me a job designing and redesigning weapons and vehicles for the UNSC.

Idiots-ne. All they did was put me in a position where I had the tools available to quietly and discreetly reverse the effects of the spell sigils. Oh, they still caused me great pain when I used my magic, but they became amplifiers rather than inhibitors. The pain was nothing; I was descended from the greatest martial arts expert of the day, the legendary Ku Fei-yo!

Armed with my new magic-amplifying sigils and my various incarnations of the Casseiopeia, I initiated my grand plan (actually, it was kind of forced on me in that 'travel-back-in-time-or-die-by-plasma-barrage' sort of way-yo) and ended up back in 1997. Some crazy lady calling herself the guardian of the planet or something kicked me forward to 2004, where the resultant complete drain of my magical resources and the plasma burns to my legs left me essentially catatonic and immobile in the care of a nation called MolMol for a full year.

The next year, my plan truly began in earnest-yo. Taking up residence in Mahora, I was put into the all-girls' middle school, and to my great consternation (there's some great spaciocosmic deity up there laughing at me and I know it-ne!) I discovered that I'd been put in a class with all the partners and allies of my great ancestor. That's right, the famed Ala Alba itself-yo! Or, well, not so famed. Not the way that ONI suppressed all information related to my great ancestor, his exploits, and anything to do with magic really. There was another group running around at the same time as Ala Alba, something to do with storms or something; information on them is even sketchier than that of Ala Alba, and really it's only because it's part of my family lineage that I know anything about them-ne.

I knew I'd have to watch out for that famous 'Storm' group as well.

It was a grand plan, elegantly-simple in its concept yet intricately-detailed in execution, with multiple failsafes and backup plans to ensure ultimate success. The goal: reveal magic to the world. The method: cast a _Forced Recognition_ magic spell in resonance with Mahora's World Tree and the twelve holy locations around the world. The process: Capture six magical hotspots around the World Tree, deactivate the school barrier in order to summon techno-demons to begin the resonance, keep areas secure until the spell is incanted.

The hitch in the plan: my great ancestor and his team of ministra magi and other allies.

I had a counter for that, of course. My careful observations and studies (not to mention the fact that Chachamaru was essentially a walking spybot [on top of all her other functions-ne]) gave me the information that my great ancestor and his team regularly made use of a training 'resort' owned by the Dark Evangel, the Maga Nosferatu, the Daywalker, the legendary villain Evangeline A.K. McDowell….

I seem to have a habit of indulging in great fanfare-ne…

Anyway, this magical resort used a very primitive form of time-manipulating magic, that being it altered the flow of time within the bounds of the resort: a day within the resort was equivalent to only an hour in the real world. In a careful release of leaked information that was almost Palpatine-esque, I passed along information of my plan to Kazumi Asakura, knowing it would find its way back to my great ancestor through the class gossip-monger. And, things from there were _proceeding just as I had foreseen_, nyahahahaha!

Wow, too much melodrama. I think I let my villain role get a little too into my head-yo. Anyway, as I expected, they held a strategy meeting inside their resort. They fell right into my trap. See, I'd rigged one of the multitude of handheld Casseiopeia units to trigger when the resort's exit magic was activated. Once activated, the Casseiopeia would kick them forward a whole week in time, long after they'd have any opportunity at all to prevent or undo my plan. With this, my victory was perfect!

Or at least, that's how things were supposed to go. Damn my great ancestor and his clever inventiveness! He found a way to get back through time somehow! He got to see the future where I succeeded with ease and I didn't! How crappy is that-ne?

And then that strategy he came up with to counteract mine. Oooh, what deviousness! Hehe, now I know where I get it-yo. Even I hadn't thought of his idea to utilize a student defense force to counteract my army of combat androids. Thankfully I'd had the foresight to program my units to specifically use nonlethal measures, else I'd have gotten in a lot of trouble for killing a bunch of civilians! Too effectively, the 'Mage Knights' made short work of my first wave of 2500 units. That was okay. I had another 15,000 in reserve. The might of the mage teachers, the so-called 'Hero Units' of the battle, meant nothing before the technological superiority of my compulsory time leap ammunition. Even the militarily-superior 'Echo Base' and the thrice-cursed 'Fireteam Charlie' fell before the onslaught of my forces. (Don't even get me started on Fireteam Charlie-yo; I don't have _any_ idea how these people in this time period learned of the Human-Covenant War, but to turn it into a video game that these people cosplay and make light of the very real threat of extinction everyone I know from my time period is facing! It infuriates me-yo!)

One by one, my army overran the outmatched and outnumbered defenders, everywhere except for the World Tree, where everyone left had gathered in a last-ditch defense that was everything that the World War II defense of the Home Island should have been. I'm forced to at once praise and curse the girl Yuuna Akashi; I knew that she was an adept because of her parents being mages, but I'd underestimated her leadership abilities-ne.

But, as I knew it would, the battle was ultimately decided in the confrontation between myself and my great ancestor. It was glorious. His mastery and control of the Casseiopeia, something that I'd barely managed to achieve with a 26th-century 'smart' AI that he had performed with _the prediction sprite and the manipulation of small things sprite_. His level of skill with kenpo, though not up to the level of skill as Ku Fei, was a match to my own, and it was that skill and ingenuity that brought the first half of our battle to an end, resulting in the destruction of the Casseiopeia built into the back of my battle armor.

That forced my trump card. I unsealed my magic, activated the sigil amplifiers, and engaged my great ancestor in the greatest display of magical combat the mundane world has seen since the Middle Ages. Fire, lightning, and wind split apart the evening sky, culminating in a final, grand showdown, a contest of power, strength, and determination between the most powerful spells in our arsenal, my incendiary _Heaven's Flame_ against my great ancestor's _Jupiter Thunderstorm_. For a time, we were evenly-matched (damn him for thinking to spend the time I needed to finish my incantation charging more power into his spell!). Then, at the climax, my sigils failed me, explosively-detonating as I channeled too much power through them. The one in the center of my forehead stunned me, causing me to lose control over my spell. In that moment, it raged out of control like the firestorm it truly was, the excess magic flowing out of me overpowering the spell, blowing away my great ancestor's spell and nearly killing him in the conflagration. He survived, fortunately (can't exist if my great ancestor dies, of course-ne!) but the outcome was clear: even with his overcoming of my trap and his ingenious counter-plan, the victory belonged to me.

After that, things went about as I had expected: a great number of mages were recalled to the Mundus Magicus to face punishment for their failure to stop my plan. In response to this, a large number of newly-aware mundanes staged protests worldwide and blockaded the teleportation gateways into the magic world to prevent what they regarded as unjust treatment by the 'ruling elite.' My robotic army, newly-reprogrammed to apply lethal force where and when necessary, prevented any serious incidents from occurring. The activities of _Cosmo Entelecheia_ had not been anticipated, but their destruction of the gateports leading to the magic world had proven beneficial enough. Eventually, things settled down, magic became an accepted norm of society, and I allowed myself to breathe a sigh of relief, thinking that I had changed the future for the better.

If only things were so easy. The American military had taken a keen interest in my army, and after refusing several of their requests to give them a number of units to study, they simply took it upon themselves to spirit away some of the wrecked units that had been destroyed at the battle that had come to be known by the fanciful moniker of 'Mages vs. Mars.' I didn't see much harm in it at the time; America was notoriously inept when it came to the field of robotics and artificial intelligence, so even if they had managed to create something dangerous, it would be nowhere near the scale of power exhibited by the Chachamaru-series combat units I had designed, let alone my only successful/surviving unit of the more-or-less-failed Intelligent Target-Silencing Unit program.

I'd looked on at the American program with amusement as they unveiled their "Automated Tank Type-1" design, an ugly, treaded thing that wasn't half a match for any of my own units. One thing Americans were good at, however, was aircraft, as demonstrated by their "Aerial Hunter-Killer" unmanned combat air vehicles. Really, I should have seen the signs then-ne…

It was the one thing I hadn't foreseen. It was an inside joke on my part that backfired in the worst possible way. I had designed the infantry units of my army to visually resemble the title character from the _Terminator_ movies. How was I to know that the American military would take the wreckage of my infantry units and, just like the plot of _Terminator 3_, construct Skynet from the pieces.

July 24, 2008. Better known as Judgment Day. Skynet went active, the sky fell, and fire consumed the world. You could blame Cyberdyne for creating the Skynet project in the first place, you could blame the US military for finishing it and activating it. But I'm a Springfield-yo, and it's in my blood to own up to my mistakes.

My name is Chao Lingshen. Because of me, the machines rose, and humanity faces an extinction every bit as visceral as the one offered to us by the Covenant in the distant future.

This is not the future I remembered.


End file.
